from the but-of-course dept

One of the many complaints about the "six strikes" Copyright Alert System (CAS) in the US is the fact that while it doesn't directly lead to litigation, there is nothing in the agreement that prevents copyright holders from seeking out and using information from the six strikes system in copyright infringement lawsuits. And, surprise surprise, it appears that at least one copyright trolling operation has jumped to the front of the line in testing this out. Malibu Media, who was already building up quite the reputation as a copyright troll (not quite Prenda-like, but still up there), is trying to get Verizon to cough up a ton of information, including details from its six strikes system.

As TorrentFreak notes, the list of information demanded via subpoena has been culled down to the following:

DMCA notices and if applicable six strike notices sent to the applicable subscribers.

Defendants’ bandwidth usage.

Information about the (reliability of the) correlation of the IP-Address to the subscriber for purposes of use at trial.

Content viewed by Defendants to the extent the content is the same show or movie that Plaintiff learned from third-party BitTorrent scanning companies that Defendants also used BitTorrent to download and distribute.

So far, Verizon (who has been one of the better companies in resisting copyright trolls) is objecting to handing over the information and has so far refused to do so, arguing that it does not wish to help "shakedown tactics" by copyright trolls. Malibu is now trying to have the court compel Verizon to cough up the info. Given that we'll likely see more of this, how the court responds should be worth following.

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Right. And remember: most people probably haven't had the opportunity to contest the accusation because they haven't had the required number of "strikes" yet. The accusation(s) may even be false, but there's no way to know because it could not be contested yet.

But that won't stop the Trolls from using that as "evidence" in court. And, as always, people would rather pay $1000 for the troll to go away (settle) than to deal with the court battle (which will become rather expensive, and the troll can just bail out and with no consequences).

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"It does not explain the request for usage data. Actual uploading or downloading has little relevance in an infringement case involving torrent swarms. "

In their minds, if they get the data and see that Joe Q Public had 1:1 or close upload/download ratio, they can run around screaming that of course he must be guilty of copyright infringement, that the only files he could have been sharing are commercial copyright files. The possibility that he may simply be sharing Linux distros (that can and does happen) or his own works or works he has permission for won't even be entertained.

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It's the setup for a classic shakedown:

1. Get information on people who may or may not have gotten/looked at pirated stuff.
2. Send threatening legal notices about the possibility of getting sued en masse to those people.
3. Demand compensation of precisely-not-as-expensive-as-a-lawyer to make the legal threat go away.
4. ???
5. Profit!

The entire operation hinges on people not having enough money (or know-how) to actually go to court, because the claims the copyright troll has are far more shaky when they go to court (see: Righthaven, Prenda Law, etc.) than when dealing with people directly.

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I have never seen such an explosion in blatant unchecked corruption than at any other time in our nation's history.

You can add blind, bloody-minded stupidity (and/or ignorance) to the mix. They don't understand tech., but that's what they're using to fight. An IP address != an individual. An open WiFi router can be used by the accused and anyone else in the vicinity. Networked printers and septagenarian grandmas have been accused of infringing, the latter never having even heard of Bittorrent.

Meanwhile, our elected reps sell the justice system down the river for campaign finance donations from lobbyists, and the courts fill up with civil lawsuits (maybe) that are starting to look like felony prosecutions. A quarter of a million dollar fine for ripping a DVD? Come on!

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c'mon, you know better:
the MAFIAA don't give a shit about 'the tech', never have, never will...

they are ALL about maintaining their gatekeeper status, and 'the tech' is making their stranglehold untenable...
so, they use 'the tech' to oppress us where they can, scare us where they can't, and scorch the earth where we want to plant the seeds of ideas...

fuckers have NO morals, NO sense of equity, and NO duty to society: they are leeches and parasites DESTROYING our culture, not preserving it...

IF EVERY ONE OF THE MAFIAA goons fell of the earth tomorrow, it would be a great day... (and NOTHING of value would be lost, on the contrary, great gains for the public domain...)

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It is a Classic Shakedown basically.As others have Noted here and on other really good Tech Websites.

1.They Claim you did something
2.You do not have the ability to fight back as you are supposed to go to a Court Hearing that might be 3000 from your home.Nor even if it was close do you have the Ability to shell out 1000's of dollars to hire Lawyer.
3.You are more of a Sheep Person and just figure you might as well pay as that is going to be easier on your meager savings if you even have any.
4.PROFIT ! The A-Hole Greedbags hit the Treasure Chest again and again.

Yes, you see now ! F#ckers is what they are..........and the same to the ones in Government and the Caved-In ISP's .

it also reinforces what everyone was saying about how this system would be abused, but how the idiot in charge of the new 6 strikes enforcement denied it all. it also shows that regardless of what a company says, using this post as an example, they have no information that can be used against someone, relying only on an accusation being backed by the courts. now they are able to take other companies to court to get information that those other companies MIGHT have so they can sue. i assume the other companies, however, will get nothing out of the case, even though there would be no case without them. if they are compelled by the courts to hand over information, they should then charge whatever the court gives in settlement, so the original company still ends up with nothing! just read as well where a guy running a proxie site has had his bank accounts seized by BREIN and his paypal account shut down as well. he hadn't payed fines apparently, but i cant see how BREIN has the authority to send in the bailiffs without a court order. they are also trying to get proxie sites shut and anyone running one from being prevented from starting another one up! this stuff is getting worse!

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It's a fear tactic meant to intimidate proxy site owners, similar to the Megaupload raid done to intimidate file hosting websites.

It's getting to the point where corporate-centric IP/copyright laws are more important than human lives. We should worry about protecting human rights first and foremost. If we can't even get that right, soon we'll have no rights.

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Yeah, that'll be a solution. Because the program will be executed perfectly, with nobody's grandmother or networked printer falsely accused of piracy. If you're accused, you must be guilty, and therefore deserve whatever the trolls do to you.

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You're still going on about that? That this system is flawless and that no-one will be falsely accused?
The amount of evidence Techdirt has reported on about how many people are being falsely accused with little to no evidence should convince you of it.
But no. You're the type who must put his hands over his ears and go "Lalalalala! Can't hear you! You iz evil dirty pirates!"

I'm not even going to try explaining to you. We've tried countless times, and no matter how many times we explain that people are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, you're here waving your tiny dick around saying "No, you're all fucking evil pirates, and all that's needed is an accusation, no trial, no jury".

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Okay. Read this question carefully. Every word.

What is to stop someone from looking up someone else's IP address, seeing they get service from Verizon or Comcast, and then sending a message to the ISP that they accuse the subscriber of copyright infringement...let me remind you, the only evidence being provided is an IP address, which is useless! What's to stop someone from not even monitoring torrent files, and just filling in a random IP address? As far as the ISP is concerned, the person making the accusation is telling gospel truth? What's to stop someone from making a false accusation? How does "not pirating" help? You can still be accused, even if you subscribe to an internet package but never actually once use the damn thing!

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lol. That's not how six strikes works, you silly, fear-mongering buffoon.

It's not run by the public. I can't just "send a message to the ISP and accuse you of infringement".

If not the copyright holder (i.e someone in the public), exactly who does make the accusations of infringement? Or do you think that you must be a some mega-corporation in order to have a valid copyright?

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It's silly fear mongering to be concerned we may get accused of copyright infringement from organizations that manage to accuse *themselves* of copyright infringement?

That's like saying "I never speed, therefore those intersection cameras will never affect me, only you dirty speeders!" I wonder if your tune would change if you were one of the people who's parked car was cited for speeding.

You are just as vulnerable to six strikes as everyone else, whether you pirate or not. The only way to avoid it is to not use the internet at all.

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Yes, because the underlying ideas of 'IP address = person', 'accusation = guilt', and 'going through the court systems = too much work, better to do it unofficially' is so very different between the various (insert number)-strike systems. /s

WOW

So what everyone said would probably happen is happening and people are surprised, damn willfully ignorant is what i call it and those that were so demented to think this would not happen and was not a threat should not be allowed to ever again make any contribution to anyy form of policy in any are involving anything to do with tech.

If this ends up being a huge farce to cover up the race to troll people for money the ISP's could end up being ruled against in court when someone decided to sue them enmass.
Seriously they knew this was going to happen, even with the promises from the industry that everyone knows is not worth shit.

Now the isps need to make a decision once and for all, do they want to be held liable for the content they transfer or not. If not then they need to stop their crazy agreements with the entertainment industry. Get down to improving their service and let the entertainment industry improve theirs.

Bandwidth usage

As if the only reason for having high bandwidth usage is downloading movies on BitTorrent. Riiight.

Instead of the tired old (but still valid) "downloading a Linux distribution" example, how about this one: running a full Bitcoin client. The traditional client (which should be more properly be called a "node", since it acts both as a client and as a server, in true P2P fashion) downloads the full Bitcoin block chain on first start up (all seven gigabytes of it, and counting), and keeps downloading (and uploading) new blocks and transactions as they come up.

There is no way one can say running a full bitcoin node is copyright violation. Yet, it can cause high bandwidth usage, both download and upload.

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Well they don't want just bandwidth. Its pretty easy to guess though that they are going to point to things like the user got a strike, their address was definitely using said IP, They run bittorrent, and use alot of bandwidth therefore they pirated whatever we say they did.

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"how about this one: running a full Bitcoin client."

Well you certainly like to jump into it.

How about this instead of a $1000 rip off to a scam you suddenly are facing 10 to 20 years for running a money laundering operation, violating US import/export financial reporting requirements, fraud, and a host of other financial crimes that federal, stater, and local prosecutors can through at you.

Talking about stupid and ignorant this is stupid and ignorant on steroids with a manicurist death wish.

So you're saying ISP records shouldn't be like phone records.

Which have been used at trial for decades. Same thing. You fanboys still haven't grasped that the information society has evil applications. Just think what a subpoena to Google for all records of where a given IP has visited might turn up about your piratey habits.

But I DON'T endorse the tactics of MM: in my opinion, ALL cases filed should go to jury trial; juries have the power to decide what the law is and whether it's properly applied, to dislike and decide against the plaintiff on Populist grounds, and perhaps even to sanction the plaintiff directly. Of course, that'd clog the courts, empower citizens, and some justice might get done, so lawyers are under great pressure by their guild to avoid jury trials.

[And I think Mike is hoping this is the replacement for trivial and dull Prenda Law in his "At The Bench" series.]

Re: So you're saying ISP records shouldn't be like phone records.

Re: So you're saying ISP records shouldn't be like phone records.

"Juries have the power to decide what the law is and whether it's properly applied"

No. Juries have the power to rule on fact. A Judge tells the jury what the law is, and the Jury weighs evidence and makes a ruling of fact, that is to say, what happened. They take that ruling of fact and use the instructions as to the law to come to a verdict. Many cases have been overturned in appeal because the jury made a ruling of law rather than fact or the judge failed to properly educate a jury as to the law.

"So you're saying ISP records shouldn't be like phone records."

Phone records can not be equated to subscriber usage data in this context. Most notably, Phone records were never widely (or possibly at all) used in this fashion. There was no major case where 1-900-Fuck-You tried to blackmail you into paying $500 or they would publicly identify you in court documents as having called them (with a fake credit card).

Phone records are not automatically released in civil cases either. I can't get AT&T to give me identifying or usage data on 702-555-0109 without a judge telling them to. But the problem we see here is MM is expecting to get extensive identification and usage data outside of a court. Likely because the court will say no, given the history of IP-capture-based lawsuits.

The history of these situations (Phone vs IP) suggests that Comparing them is comparing apples to oranges.

I know, and Mike knows that Information society has evi applications. That is why Techdirt spends so much time covering bad laws and bad actions by public and private entities, to highlight and inform us on how our information is being abused. I take what Techdirt exposes for me and display that same activism out to my friends and colleagues. A subpoena is different though, then what MM is looking for right now. Which is avoiding the court altogether and jumping straight to the blackmail without the pesky court asking questions.

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No. Juries have the power to rule on fact. A Judge tells the jury what the law is, and the Jury weighs evidence and makes a ruling of fact, that is to say, what happened. They take that ruling of fact and use the instructions as to the law to come to a verdict.

Rest assured, you'll see this argument again from OOTB, but the statement is still insightful*1000.

Discounting jury nullification, the jury weighs the evidence (and the veracity of the witnesses testimony of that evidence.)

Caved

Well, here you go. All of you ISP's who caved to the pressure from the IP sector, you are no longer just dumb pipes. Bend over. Is it time to dump six strikes now? Have you learned anything yet? Simply helping them isn't enough, they will find more ways to screw you (And the rest of us).

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Why do you refuse to understand that the ISP want into the content distribution game and whole-heartedly embrace six strikes. No one forced them, this is a partnership between content and ISP's. It is an alliance that will likely give infringers their first real challenge.

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'No one forced them, this is a partnership between content and ISP's'

Yeah, right, and if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you.

The big reason the ISP's caved and became yet another arm of hollywood's copyright enforcement division is because Biden 'suggested' that if they didn't, they'd start seeing some less than pleasant regulations headed their way.

i know the entertainment industries would love it, but i really can see the internet becoming something that only the rich can use, simply because, regardless of what all these ISPs and government agencies say about getting faster and more stable broadband operating, there are more companies and industries trying to stop the whole shebang!! given how the governments are in the pockets of big business, i can see which side will win!

"Which have been used at trial for decades. Same thing. You fanboys still haven't grasped that the information society has evil applications. Just think what a subpoena to Google for all records of where a given IP has visited might turn up about your piratey habits."
Can non-law enforcement entities demand phone companies release phone records? ie, if I feel that another party has done some wrong to me, can I force their phone company to hand over his phone records?

Are you slow or something? Yes, money of course money and it's 99.9% about money. Why do you think the studios call infringing stealing? It's all about money. The ISP's want in the club. The content companies let them in and now the ISP's have skin (money) in the enforcement game. This is a revelation to perhaps only you.

"Content viewed by Defendants"

Well that one's easy, at least. There's no way your ISP can tell (yet) what was actually *viewed*. Best they could manage is to tell them that something was streamed, but it's certainly possible that nobody was watching at the time.

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Sure. and that may have some correlation to what was "viewed", but they're not the same thing. The request is for what "Content was viewed by Defendants" not "Content that was streamed to defendants computers", which is the closest the ISP can come.

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While it is true that they can, ISP's typically cannot tell what was streamed. I got an e-mail from TimeWarner already about my use of BitTorent's peer2peer protocol for downloading a bunch of files sizing a couple of GB in size. I don't use Torrent P2P unless of course it deals with updating my actual software, and even then TimeWarner now caps all downloads greater than 650MB in size to 1.0 megabyte a second when I should be getting 3.5 to 4 on normal files (ironically Nintendo 64 ROM's which are 64 Megabytes (512 megabits) in size at most. This is really annoying with size able Source Engine updates to TF2, CSS...etc...

Thank God

Thank God. For a quick second, I actually thought "now that Prenda is on its deathbed, we have to pray that either John Steele opens up Salt Marsh LLC, with Alan Money as attorney of record, or we're going to have a whole lot of popcorn end up in the trash given how so little was needed during the "12 minutes".

Now at least, Malibu Media had the forethought to take advantage of this opportunity and I for one only want to know how fast we can get this over to Judge Wright's court calendar.

Thank you Malibu Media for giving us a side door to use to kill 6 Strikes.
By dragging these nonlegal notices into the courts the door is open to challenge the reality of them.
As 6 Strikes holds account holders responsible for acts they may not have knowledge of expect a ruling from the courts reaffirming that a name on the bill does not make them responsible under the copyright act and you have to actually prove who did it.
A nice explosion from this will be a Federal Court declaring 6 Strikes to be flawed in the court system.
As they like to pretend these notices are legal in some fashion, this will hurt the system and hopefully get enough people pissed off enough to kill it.